The gobe binary is a swf flash movie. It does not use the Adobe compiler. Instead it uses haxe , an open source language that can compile for the flash player. It has a syntax very similar to actionscript 3.
git clone git://github.com/brentp/gobe.git
cd gobe/flash haxe gobe.hxml
and you should see no output, but a new gobe.swf file will be created. If it does not, make sure haxe is installed correctly.
put the gobe directory in a web directory and point your browser to: http://yourhost/web/path/to/gobe/ and you should see a page with several demo links. You may have to have Firebug or some console enabled as the movie will try to log events to the console and your browser may error if there’s no console to write to.
you do not need an IDE to write haxe, simply edit any of the .hx files in the flash directory and re-run haxe gobe.hxml
For debugging, trace() messages will go to the browser console (either FireBug in firefox or the developer console [ctrl+shift+j] in chrome).
Gobe.hx contains the code simply to load the annotations data and distribute work to the Track, SubTrack, and Annotation classes in HSP.hx.
Track.hx contains the Track, SubTrack, Edge and Annotation classes. a Track contains data from a single dataset. It has bpmin and bpmax that determine its extent–these are used for drawing and scaling. Each Track has at least 2 subtracks–AnnoTracks. One for the + strand, and one for the minus. For each HSP between a given track and another track there will be 2 additional subtracks, one for the + and one for the - strand. These subtracks are stored in a Hash called subtracks for each Track. Tracks are stored in the static hash Gobe.tracks.
An Annotation is any feature that is drawn in the flash movie other than a track (e.g. HSP, CDS, gene, etc). The draw() method on the Annotation class contains the logic for rendering all feature types. It depends on the information parsed from the stylesheet (default is gobe.css ). The information in the stylesheet tells the Annotation class how to render each feature type. For example, the stylesheet contains a CDS block that indicates the line_color, width and fill_color to be used when rendering an Annotation with a type of CDS. This allows the user to specify any feature type as long as they also specify a corresponding entry in the stylesheet.
Util.hx contains miscellaneous code for doing stuff. Any code that is repeated or general or hacky should be made as clean as possible and put into Util.hx as a static method.
Glyph.hx handles most of the drawing of features. Glyph class will dispatch the drawing method based on the glyph style. Define your own glyph style in the css file.
The haxe api docs are pretty good. For flash stuff, use the flash9 (not flash). For much of the code, you can probably find existing examples in the codebase of using Hash or Array or looping.
The adobe docs are good when they come up on a google search for a particular class or method.